Found four unopened boxes of gourds in the garage a few weeks ago. Sort of felt like Christmas!!
As a break from constantly working in two dimensions with my painting, I decided to try my hand at creating this little gourd sculpture for my office.
At the best of times, I’m not good at cleanup but I persevered with the outside of the gourd, soaking it in a mild bleach solution and scrubbing off the mold with a stainles steel scrubby I wanted to create a vessel from the gourd so I cut a hole in the top with my small jigsaw, put on a mask and starting scraping out the inside. (I do this part outdoors. Don’t want all that “stuff” flying around in my studio!) Once the inside was smooth, I painted it a flat black.
I painted the gourd with the blue latex we used to paint the office walls. As a bonus, I found this fibrous paper in my “stash” that contained small gold paper inclusions and embedded leaves. I glued the paper to the gourd using Matte Medium. I tore the paper into small irregular pieces, brushed medium onto the gourd, placed the paper then applied more medium on top. I started by tearing roughly around the leaves then forming the leaves into a kind of necklace around the rim of the gourd. Then I just randomly applied small pieces of paper to cover the surface.
I dyed a bunch of pine needles black using RIT dye (the tips of the needles go black; the rest of the needle doesn’t absorb the color as well) then sewed them to the rim. I attached a few Swarovski crystals, added some fibers from my wife’s supply and a couple of I Ching coins I pick up when I’m in Toronto’s Chinatown and voila, I had a small, completed sculpture for the office.
dieing pine needles….who’da thunk it! You’re so creative….btw I got the same coins but didn’t have to make a trip to Chinatown…. I drove over to Wally’s world!!!!!! LOL
Bob – you have inspired me yet again. I too have a box of various gourds plus 3 “bowls” purchased at C2C this year (I’m lazy and like mine already cleaned and cut!). Was planning to do one with the Dremel tool for a mosaic effect with the painting but love the idea of the decoupage too. Isn’t it great to have jobs where we get to play all the time!!!
I absolutely love this!!!
Beautiful job you did playing with your toys!